REVIEW: A complicated, beautiful ‘Homebody’ at Central Square

Monday

Apr 24, 2017 at 3:32 PMApr 24, 2017 at 3:32 PM

By David Brooks Andrews, Correspondent

CAMBRIDGE - As the audience steps into the much smaller of two stages, mostly dark, in the Central Square Theater to see the first act of “Homebody” by Tony Kushner, Debra Wise sits on stage, in the light, quietly reading her guidebooks to Afghanistan with rapt attention. She goes from book to book, pauses, looks up for a moment while considering an idea, smiles and then continues reading. The whole time she ignores everyone in the theater.

She wears a white blouse, gray sweater, a scarf and black pants, and her hair is curled softly over her ears and neck and her feet are comfortably bare. There are piles of books, a paper bag on the floor, a lamp and a coffee cup set on a table. Behind her is a fairly narrow bookshelf, filled with books. It is her character’s own home and she feels completely comfortable in it.

The play, set in London, is directed by Nora Theater Artist Director Lee Mikeska Gardner, who works so well with Wise, and Wise with her, that you can’t tell where one picks up from the other.

Once we’re settled into our seats and everything is ready, Wise begins the one-woman play, which is actually the first act of the play, talking about an outdated guidebook titled “Kabul.” She says it is a city “which as we all know, has … undergone change.” We gulp at the delicate choice of words, covering up all the modern tragedy we know that our country and others have contributed to the change. She reads to us about what first happened in that area in 3,000 BC. As she reads, you realize she has fallen deeply in love with Kabul.

Soon she tells us another fact that she later explores by saying, “Several months ago I was feeling low and decided to throw a party and a party needs festive hats.” She mysteriously keeps from us the location of the shop where she goes to buy the Afghan hats, but instead makes a simple sound in place of the address.

The play, which lasts an hour and 10 minutes or so, is often filled with complicated big words and abstract language so that you may struggle a little to understand. You also hear language that is beautiful and playful - "does that nebula know it nebulates?” The words drop into passages that are rich, beautiful and mostly understandable. The play alternates between Wise reading occasional statements from the guidebooks to speaking elaborate, and sometimes beautiful, passages written by Kushner. As a whole, the play gives the character’s rich imaginative sense of Afghanistan.

Wise speaks with total life and is fully invested in what she is saying, listening to each word to see if it sounds correct or can be improved upon, giving sense to elaborate words you don’t fully understand, moving her hands in an exotic fashion (at one point crashing them into each other), understanding fully herself what she is saying, and making you feel like you, too, almost understand, more or less. She is magnificent to listen to and watch.

Her character admits to being an optimist, who says, “Oh I love the world! I love love love love the world! Having said so much, may I assume most of you will have dismissed me as a simpleton?” But she admits her husband cannot bear the sound of her and has threatened to leave, so she rarely speaks to him and not very often about him. They both take antidepressants, but she frequently takes his pills, instead of her own, so she can find out what he’s feeling. But you think that she really does love the world and that, at least during this hour and 10 minutes, is quite happy, if somewhat entangled.

She describes the place where she found the hats, “I must have passed and mentally noted on my way towards God knows what, who cares, a dusty shop crowded with artifacts, relics, remnants, little . . . doodahs of a culture once aswarm with spirit matter, radiant with potent magic. . .” She later continues, “The hats were in a barrel which could be seen through the window; puppets hung from the ceiling, carved freestanding figurines, demiurges, attributes, symbols, carven abstractions. . . amber beads big as your baby’s fists. . .” And she explains that she bought the 10 hats, which looked like or were truly Afghan hats, for a mere “three ninety-nine” each.

She sees that the merchant at the store has three fingers cut off at a clean diagonal and wonders why. And they have an interesting exchange and exotic quasi adventure.

At the end of the show, she says, “Frank Sinatra is playing: such an awful awful man, such perfect perfect music! A paradox!”

You are convinced that she is so wound up in her own thoughts that she could barely step out onto the streets of London. But if you read about the play, which Kushner wrote just months before 9/11, you are surprised that in Act Two, which is not part of this performance at the Central Square Theater, her husband and daughter go to look for her in Afghanistan.

It’s a show that some other theater may pick up when it finishes its two-and-a-half-week run in Cambridge. It deserves more time, and would be enjoyed for much longer, on some other stage in the area.

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